Troy Polamalu has always looked for ways to show appreciation to his fans for their great support. He did this throughout the football season by giving away tickets to regular season and playoff games while conducting contest on twitter and facebook. The by product of this generosity has resulted in a natural growth to the number of fans and followers Troy has across the social media profiles he maintains.
In these off season months, especially amid all the existing NFL lock out news, it was important for Troy to provide his online community with a way to stay connected and have a fun event to rally around. A March Madness bracket group was a great fit to accomplish those goals.
Wild Hair Media made a connection with the folks over at Yahoo! Sports and launched what quickly grew to be the largest public group in Yahoo’s annual Pick ’em tournament. It is larger than any of the groups that were opened for fans of the participating teams. It is also larger than the heavily promoted K-Swiss, Kenny Powers Tournagedon group. We were happy to see thousands of fans join and we look forward to seeing the tournament play out over the next two weeks with them.
We get to work with Troy to give out prizes to several participants. Having participated in March Madness with our own private Yahoo! Groups in the past, we realized how difficult it is to win a group. For those who pick poorly in the opening rounds but still wanted to be in the running for one of Troy’s giveaways, we decide to feature five brackets. The participant who finishes with a score immediately in front of one of these featured brackets will be eligible for one of these cool gifts.
Featured brackets included those filled out by Troy’s Steelers’ teammates, Ike Taylor and LaMarr Woodley. Other brackets were filled out by the fan running the TroysHair twitter account (big mystery), Alex Holmes made his picks and Mikey Ames filled out a bracket as the Official Wild hair Media picks.